One of my most vivid memories from my time in Purdue’s professional writing program comes from my computer-aided publishing course. This class focused heavily on the elements of document design, and the final activities for the course included two practical design projects and our rationales for the choices we made in each. Both projects had very little actual writing involved in the brunt of their work—one of them involved redesigning a document that had already been written, while the other involved finding something that was poorly designed and using an unfamiliar technology (in my case, HTML/CSS) to fix it. So at the end of these projects, while typing up my rationales, I remember suddenly having an astounding thought: I was actually writing in my professional writing course!
This memory remains vivid because it essentially represents how I have come to view the field of professional writing: Instead of efforts that produce a line of written documents one after the other, work in professional writing involves writing as a scattered constant, interspersed with technical understanding in a variety of other areas. In other words, professional writing is not just writing, editing, and publishing; it also requires that one be able to learn quickly, that one can keep up on current trends, that one can understand complex topics that may be scientific, political, or social. Perhaps most importantly, work in professional writing requires the author to be able to translate these understandings into clear and appropriate language in order to reach whatever audience they are attempting to reach.
Accomplishing this last goal—reaching the audience that needs to be reached—may oftentimes be more complicated than just using clear and concise language, although these tactics may certainly help. Indeed, one of the reasons that my academic work in professional writing put so much emphasis on topics such as user-centered design and usability testing was to show developing authors how to best approach their readers. After all, for any product (or document) to be successful, it must appeal to what the audience needs, wants, and expects. If a user cannot get a product to do what they want it to do, or if a user cannot use a document to find information that they want to find, then that product or document is practically unsuccessful, even if it somehow functions in theory.
This is all not to say that writing is somehow not an important part of professional writing—what sets this field apart from something like business analytics is that all our activities are generally connected back to writing or some other form of communication. The technical topics that one researches may oftentimes change, but at some point, a professional writer will have to write. In fact, it is this repeated connection with writing that personally keeps me interested in the subject. I love writing, and especially I love the freedom of being able to write in-depth about dozens of different things. This is perhaps more apparent in creative writing, where I can take inspiration from various and even disparate pieces when attempting to form a new work, but it is certainly present in the technical world as well.
Indeed, working as a professional writer has allowed me to write about several subjects in school alone—environmental issues, privacy debate issues, making learning techniques effective, how writing is used in the technical workplace, and the intricacies of a certain developing technology. Ultimately, this sort of variation is what I feel I would most like to do with my experience in professional writing. I would love to write about different technology in some way, be that in terms of documentation, advocation, or even some sort of journalism. And even if I never do get a professional job like this, I at least appreciate that this program has given me the range of opportunities.
This memory remains vivid because it essentially represents how I have come to view the field of professional writing: Instead of efforts that produce a line of written documents one after the other, work in professional writing involves writing as a scattered constant, interspersed with technical understanding in a variety of other areas. In other words, professional writing is not just writing, editing, and publishing; it also requires that one be able to learn quickly, that one can keep up on current trends, that one can understand complex topics that may be scientific, political, or social. Perhaps most importantly, work in professional writing requires the author to be able to translate these understandings into clear and appropriate language in order to reach whatever audience they are attempting to reach.
Accomplishing this last goal—reaching the audience that needs to be reached—may oftentimes be more complicated than just using clear and concise language, although these tactics may certainly help. Indeed, one of the reasons that my academic work in professional writing put so much emphasis on topics such as user-centered design and usability testing was to show developing authors how to best approach their readers. After all, for any product (or document) to be successful, it must appeal to what the audience needs, wants, and expects. If a user cannot get a product to do what they want it to do, or if a user cannot use a document to find information that they want to find, then that product or document is practically unsuccessful, even if it somehow functions in theory.
This is all not to say that writing is somehow not an important part of professional writing—what sets this field apart from something like business analytics is that all our activities are generally connected back to writing or some other form of communication. The technical topics that one researches may oftentimes change, but at some point, a professional writer will have to write. In fact, it is this repeated connection with writing that personally keeps me interested in the subject. I love writing, and especially I love the freedom of being able to write in-depth about dozens of different things. This is perhaps more apparent in creative writing, where I can take inspiration from various and even disparate pieces when attempting to form a new work, but it is certainly present in the technical world as well.
Indeed, working as a professional writer has allowed me to write about several subjects in school alone—environmental issues, privacy debate issues, making learning techniques effective, how writing is used in the technical workplace, and the intricacies of a certain developing technology. Ultimately, this sort of variation is what I feel I would most like to do with my experience in professional writing. I would love to write about different technology in some way, be that in terms of documentation, advocation, or even some sort of journalism. And even if I never do get a professional job like this, I at least appreciate that this program has given me the range of opportunities.
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